Alphabet by Kathy Page Page A

from home, ‘there’s no enough light in here.’ She considers it a minute, shrugs, returns her eyes to his face and likewise his attention to the question she asked. Then she leans back in her chair, sighs, looks away. It’s like a light being turned off. The place goes back to its dull and cold usual self. So as much as
anything else, it’s wanting her attention back that makes him do it.
    â€˜The fact is,’ he says, ‘I wrote to Tasmin about Amanda. I’ve opened the whole can of worms. That’s why I can’t sleep.
OK?’ He’s staring at her like she must know what all this means, but of course she can’t have read the file yet.
    â€˜Amanda?’ she asks and her ignorance seems like an advantage, an invitation. There is just him and her, here and now . . . he can get rid of the damn thing at last, he can at least do that. Simon stands, pulls the letter out of his pocket and does what he can to flatten it. He can see how she’s watching him carefully; he noticed when he came in the panic button fixed onto the right-hand side of the desk. She’s well placed to reach it if she wants to. So he slows down his movements as he removes the letter from the envelope, keeps to his half of the room when he holds it out to her.
    â€˜You can have it,’ he says, adding, ‘the fact is it was only by sheer luck that it wasn’t sent.’ She stands up, also quite slowly, reaches over. He feels the most extraordinary sensation of relief as she takes the letter from him, sits down again, removes the pages from the envelope and puts them on her desk. She reads a little, glances at the clock on the wall, then looks back to him.
    â€˜It looks important,’ she says. ‘I’ll need clear time for this.’ You can’t do this to me , he thinks, just read it, will you?
    â€˜Took all night to write but you could read it in about half an hour, I reckon,’ he tells her, jauntily, though it’s hard to keep the edge out of his voice.
    â€˜Well,’ she says. ‘I’ll need to look up the background, make notes and so on; I want to take it on properly . . . So you see, I’d really much rather set clear time aside. Meanwhile –’ Glaring at her doesn’t work. When she looks back at him, bright and curious, his eyes stop glaring and slide away . . . he can see: a brown sheepskin jacket thrown over the chair, a set of Ford car keys and a pair of leather gloves on the table.
Things from outside. Part of a life. This, his life, is just her job.
What a job. Why do it? Why do people work here? ‘Meanwhile, we can try and sort out your sleep problem. And then
we can talk about this on Wednesday,’ she tells him, tapping the letter with the fingers of her right hand. ‘Do you understand?’ she says. ‘Depending on the exact content, I may have to take copies of what you’ve given me and show it to my manager. It’s possible that certain things might follow on from this.’ Might they? What things exactly? he should be asking, but his anger has suddenly twisted away from him, run off and left him there, stranded, with everything, even his own reaction, suddenly out of his hands. Why? It must be her voice:
low, strong, blurred here and there, elsewhere oddly precise – the hidden spaces and sudden slopes in it, the way it can be so clear even when she lets it drop right down, the way it seems to add extra meaning to what she says, to widen and soften and explain it . . . At any rate, the fight has gone out of him and all he can do there is sit, watching Bernadette Nightingale talk. Then he lets his eyes close and for a moment all there is is darkness and a kind of woody scent, which could be her perfume, or just the smells of wherever she’s come from, clinging to her clothes.
    â€˜Now then,’ she is saying. ‘You seem in a bad way, Simon. I could ring the medical centre and